A sneak peek at what’s to come if The One’s serious about pushing immigration reform before the midterms. If you think the health-care rhetoric is poisonous, wait until the left has to deal with an issue that’s of special concern to minorities while they’re staring down the barrel of a potential GOP takeover of the House. The race-baiting and demonization of amnesty opponents will be like nothing the country’s seen for decades. All Obama’s doing here is sending a shot across the bow (while addressing a Mexican audience, natch).

Suddenly, even Peggy Noonan can’t shake the feeling that, when you come right down to it, Barry O’s kind of a divisive figure.

Looking back, a key domestic moment in this presidency occurred only eight days after his inauguration, when Mr. Obama won House passage of his stimulus bill. It was a bad bill—off point, porky and philosophically incoherent. He won 244-188, a rousing victory for a new president. But he won without a single Republican vote. That was the moment the new division took hold. The Democrats of the House pushed it through, and not one Republican, even those from swing districts, even those eager to work with the administration, could support it.

This, of course, was politics as usual. But in 2008 people voted against politics as usual.

It was a real lost opportunity. It marked the moment congressional Republicans felt free to be in full opposition. It gave congressional Democrats the impression that they were in full control, that no one could stop their train. And it was the moment the president, looking at the lay of the land, seemed to reveal he would not govern in a vaguely center-left way, as a unifying figure even if a beset one being beaten ’round the head by the left, but in a left way, without the modifying “center.” Or at least as one who happily cedes to the left in Congress each day.

Things got all too vividly divided. It was a harbinger of the health care debate.

And many other debates to come, no doubt. Fun fact: Per the latest Rasmussen, 33 percent think Obama’s governing as the post-partisan hero he promised us he’d be during the campaign. Percentage who think he’s governing as a partisan liberal Democrat: A cool 51. Click the image to watch.